Month: December 2010

…moved more than 200 pieces of her work into a new space in Tallahassee Mall near Sports Authority. She’ll be at the mall this weekend selling her work to raise money from around 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. each day. If you want more information or want to volunteer to help her, call 850-443-4199 or 850-591-6454.

We had a wonderful Chanukah. Hope you did too – or if you’re having Christmas, I hope you’re going to enjoy the best one yet.  And if neither of those apply, Happy December.

Happy December anyway – this has to be one of my most favorite months of the year.  People are decorating, it’s not 100* outside, it’s a great excuse to nest and eat and drink and just enjoy each others’ company.

One of the traditional foods for Chanukah is sufganiyot (pronounced: soof – gahn – ee – yote).  You know those crazy-good creme or fruit filled doughnuts at Krispy Kreme?  Sufganiyot.

Because Chanukah is based on victory of the Macabees and the miracle of the oil, we celebrate with foods fried in oil.  Thus, latkes and sufganiyot.  And it’s a good excuse for anything else you like to eat that’s fried.

I like to incorporate who we are religiously with who we are as Southerners which means so many things get this really fun spin, and *that* is really what Jewish food is all about because so much of it (seriously) is a take on the regional foods of wherever we were living in whatever era of time.  This means that sufganiyot for Av and I are beignets (for us not so much French as so many sweet powdered-sugar experiences at Cafe du Monde) filled with mayhaw or muscadine jelly. 

This sweet dough not only makes great sufganiyot, you can use the dough that’s left to make monkey bread.

Recipe (makes a ton of sufganiyot, or a reasonable amount of sufganiyot (24 average size ones) and enough for some monkey bread too):

1 cup water (at 110-115* to activate the yeast)
1-1/2 tbsp yeast
1/2 c. buttermilk
1/4 c. evaporated milk
2 eggs
2 tbsp melted butter
1 c. sugar
1 tbsp salt
6 c. all-purpose flour

Fillings: your favorite jelly, bite-size chocolates, or just a sprinkling on top

Directions:
In the Kitchenaid, combine the yeast and warm water and wait for it to bubble/activate and the yeast to dissolve – usually about 7 or 8 minutes.

Add eggs to Kitchenaid, combine well.

Add buttermilk and evaporated milk to the Kitchenaid bowl and keep mixing.

Add sugar, melted butter, salt, and flour one cup at a time while it’s still mixing.  At six cups of flour, you should be getting a dough that is coming together but not get making a ball.  If you lift the dough hook up and it slowly comes down like in the pic to the left-most below, you’re there.  Feel free to add more flour if needed.

Move the dough to a large bowl, cover with Saran and a towel so it’s nice and dark, and let rest until doubled, about 90 minutes or so.

Once the dough has risen, it’s ready to make sufganiyot.  Heat about 1/2″ of oil to 375* in a large skillet.  You can roll the dough out or do like I do and simply shape it by hand into flat little rectangles.  Turn the pieces once they become a nice golden brown, then cook on the other side until golden brown all over.

Put them on a large plate lined with paper towels.  If you like your beignets simple, you can sprinkle them with powdered sugar at this point, or when they’re just cool enough to touch, you can take a spoon and open each of them up just enough to put some filling (sometimes you’ll need to use your fork to remove a bit of dough from the inside to make room for this pocket).  

I like to fill the beignets by putting jelly in a small ziploc, cutting off one of the bottom corners, and squeezing it like a pastry bag.  Av likes it when I tuck a piece of chocolate inside.  If you like candy bars, just imagine all the options with those little bite-size pieces placed inside.  Yum.  Eat while hot.

Whatever quantity of dough is left from sufganiyot can be made into monkey bread.  Just take whatever dough is left, ask for help from the cutest three-year-old you know:

…and together roll into round pieces, about the size of a ping pong ball.  Roll each ball first into melted butter, then roll them around in a bowl with whatever proportion of white and brown sugar you like (you can add cinnamon too) and then place the little pieces in a bundt pan.

Cover the bowl with Saran and a tea towel and let rest for another 45 minutes.  Preheat the oven to 375* and then bake for 45 minutes or so, until browned:

This past weekend, I went to the annual Blue Light Special Art Show in Leeds.  I’ve seen this done some other places, where people pay $25 for a bowl of soup, with the proceeds donated to charity, and an artist – in this case, Tena Payne – supplies the homemade bowls which the patrons get to bring home.  Today the soup was made by Chris Hastings of Hot and Hot, where I first found Tena’s pottery.

Some great things at the show!

Pottery by Janice Entler (more about this soon)
Glass art by Toby Klein (more about that soon too!)
Gorgeous jewelry by Obayana B. Ajanaku
Bill Palmer’s furniture
Robert Taylor brought a tabletop bottle tree

Thank goodness for this show – between Kentuck and springtime, there’s not much going on in art festivals.

Remember the ‘big news’ I had last week and didn’t post it?  Well, I will this week.  Promise.

My friend Amy reminded me after Tuesday’s post that LEGO has an architectural series they’ve done on Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, including Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum.  And did you know that one of FLW’s sons came up with Lincoln Logs?

I wonder if Lego will try to do a series on Frank Gehry:

Image courtesy scottog used with Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license. Thank you!

Image courtesy budgetplaces.com used with Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license. Thank you!

…or the newly opened Gehry-designed Ohr-O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi.

These are some more pics I’ve been meaning to show forever – in fact, these are from before the Rosenbaum house was actually opened to the public, when Av was invited for a showing several years ago. What makes this house so fantastic is that it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939.  It belonged to the Rosenbaums from the time that it was built until Mrs. Rosenbaum sold the home and contents to the city of Florence, Alabama in 1999.

It needed a *lot* of maintenance when the city got it – Av says he remembers visiting Mrs. Rosenbaum back in the ’90s and seeing water damage and other things that needed looking after.  It took the city somewhere around $600,000 to restore it.

This is the cantilevered carport – this is an early architectural development:

We’ve visited the home a few times since these pics were taken; what I remember most about it is how small the house seems, although it is almost 2500 sq ft (for whatever reason, when I think of a Frank Lloyd Wright house, I think of some huge structure) and how understated it is.  Most of the rooms open up to the outside:

(Of course, the house is ‘open’ now and they have everything put in its place, including plastic taken off the chairs!)

Look at this great dining table below – the furniture is mostly made out of plywood – and this is all original to the home, and this dining area comes into the living room.  The house was built with radiant heating – heat coming from the floor.  It was something FLW put in his first Usonian house and continued to do.

The house was sold with its contents – those are the Rosenbaum’s menorahs on the lowest shelf:

If you’re interested in FLW homes, this is the only one in Alabama and the only one in the Southeast that’s open to the public for tours.

Alvin Rosenbaum, who grew up in the home, is not a fan of the book that was written just about this house.  He wrote his own book published by the National Trust in 1993.

Gosh, I wish we had taken more pics of the interior.  I’ll find more and post them soon.

There are no FLW homes in Georgia or Louisiana, this is the only one in Alabama, there’s one in Tennessee, and a few in Mississippi including this one in Ocean Springs that was in the news last month. 

I know.  I’ve not been updating.

But I have a really good reason, and I can’t wait to tell you about it!  I’m saving it for Wednesday.  Why Wednesday, not sure.  But Wednesday.

It’s a little volunteer activity that I started back in October…it was a big task and I have loved every minute of it.  The big event was this past Sunday, so that’s why it was so ‘quiet’ here last week (and somewhat the weeks leading up to now).  I’m hoping you’ll think it’s fun too.

—
In the meantime, my friend Larry told me about the mosaic, glass-loving artist Loring Cornish in Baltimore.

I don’t usually say this, but look at this bathroom!

More pics here.